“We do not want the crumbs from this society’s table, and we are not fighting for a place at it. We want to overturn the fucking table.”

Against Equality is a collection of essays, articles, and blog posts by radical queer activists countering the mainstream gay rights movement’s mission for “equality” (read: assimilation) and agitating instead for liberation. The book is split into three parts: The first section, “Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage,” is fairly self-explanatory in its agenda. The second, “Don’t Ask to Fight Their Wars,” argues against gay people serving in the military in the wake of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy being repealed. The third, “Prisons Will Not Protect You,” tackles matters of criminalisation, both of queerness (as in homosexuality being conflated with child sexual abuse) and of antiqueer bigotry (as in hate crime legislation). It’s very much centred on the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada, and is a time capsule of late 90s/2000s/early 2010s queer politics.

The anthology features a variety of styles from academic formality to off-the-cuff ranting, but the quality is pretty consistent. My main complaint is the repetitiveness, which I suppose was unavoidable – with multiple writers covering the same topics, the same arguments are inevitably going to be put forward multiple times, and these pieces weren’t written with the knowledge that they’d be collected into one volume so there was no reason for the writers to coordinate with one another.

I’d definitely recommend Against Equality to anyone who considers themself progressive. It isn’t perfect, but it’s worth a read.